CIW Associate: A Fresh Start on the Internet

Have you ever created a Web page? Have you ever installed a network operating system? Are you looking for an Internet-related certification that deals with real Internet technologies? If you answered yes, you should look into the CIW certification. This article tells you how.

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Contrary to the pundits on CNN, the Internet is not dead. Proof? You're
here, aren't you? Internet technologies are still growing despite the
dot.com crash on Wall Street. Intranets, new technologies, and more affordable
bandwidth are helping the Internet improve, reinvent, and restructure. Are you
keeping up or giving up?

The Certified Internet Webmaster is a program from Prosoft that is geared for
Internet professionals looking to prove their expertise in four areas of master
certification: Administrator, Enterprise Developer, Designer, and Web Site
Manager. Each of the Master CIW titles begins with the CIW Associate exam.
Let's take a look at this initial exam and what you'll need to pass
it.

For starters, the CIW exam is an entry-level exam that will test your
knowledge of e-commerce, security, HTML, and basic networking. According to
Prosoft, as of this writing, there are 25,000 CIW certifications earned so far.
An exam candidate should have three to six months of experience of Internet
technology experience prior to taking the exam. The exam costs $125 per
attemptbut brags an 80% passing rate. Of course, Prosoft recommends that
candidates take a five-day foundations class to adequately prep.

So, what is on this exam? You can expect questions stemming from three
primary categories: Internet Fundamentals, Web Page Authoring Fundamentals, and
Networking Fundamentals. Let's break these down a bit more.

Internet Fundamentals

You'll need a bird's-eye view of the Internet and how it works, for
starters. This includes the evolution of the Internet. You'll need to know
how the Internet works for both clients and servers. The exam will challenge
your understanding of DNS resolution, registering domain names, and the
difference between intranets and extranets.

On the client side, you will need to know how browsers request and send
information to Web servers. This means you'll need to know details of both
Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. A CIW will be
able to customize either browser, deal with fonts, set home pages, add
favorites, and purge the history of Web sites visited (not that there's
anything naughty in the history). On a more technical note, you'll also
need to know about the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and its influence on
today's portable devices (think phones and PDAs).

You'll also need to able to configure and connect to FTP servers through
traditional command-line applications and fancier GUI interfaces. This exam will
require you to configure a newsreader for newsgroups and multiple servers. Of
course, you'll still need experience with Telnet and need to know why
it's hanging around.

What would the Internet be like without email? Pretty boring. This exam will
attack many issues on email configuration, usage, and applications. You'll
need to know how to configure email messages, how to send and receive email, and
how to configure mail applications such as Netscape Messenger and Microsoft
Outlook Express. I'm personally glad to see that this exam will cover
netiquette (etiquette for email and more). Candidates will need to be able to
configure email signatures, attachments, and mailing lists.

This exam will test your knowledge and understanding of objects, plug-ins,
and viewers for a multimedia-enhanced Web site. You will need to know what
objects and active content are and how they can impact Web traffic, server load,
and a user's experience. This exam will expect you to have a cursory
knowledge of C, C++, Java, JavaScript, ActiveX, and VBScript. You don't
have to dream in code, just know what each is capable of.

How the heck do we ever find anything on the Web? Search engines! This exam
will test your knowledge of how to use a search engine, how to add a Web site to
search engine directory, and how to use search indexes. You'll need to be
able to use some tricks and Boolean operators to filter the search results of
any search engine to pass this exam. The objective on search engines also
includes the ability to search for people, mailing lists, and newsgroups.

Did you lock the back door? Yeah, I'm talking about security. We've
all heard about all the trashing and thrashing Web sites have gone through, so
you can expect this exam to test your ability to secure Internet usage for
clients, servers, and networks. That means you'll need to be able to work
with cookies, send secure date, configure user authentication, and enable
digital certificates. You can also count on questions dealing with viruses,
proxy servers, and firewalls.

This third of the exam wraps up with a section on e-commerce. You need to
know what it is, how it works, and why it's so great for business and
users. Expect questions on Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) and Electronic
Data Interchange (EDI).